Currently Listening What Is Love For By Justin Currie see related

But Esau I have hated, 'cause he didn't send me flowers. Dumb jerk.

What a pathetic, shameful excuse for a holiday.

Ok, ok... before I get a slew of hopeless romantics who wish to stone me for slaying Aphrodite and all that is sweet, heart-shaped and wrapped in plastic, but allow me to explain my negative expression.

This holiday was once a celebration of a Saint, many centuries ago.

Then, when the peasants of 270 AD got over disease, famine and LSD-laced bread, they realized that the few meager earnings they had could pay for their material expressions of love, such as "ye olde flask" and "ye olde moldey candey confectioneth". It used to be about love, even when the shillings had run dry and the disease returned to their neglected, germ-riddled hovels.

And today? Slap some cash on the counter and you've bought yourself some love.

As Francis Bacon says, "It is impossible to love and be wise."

"Love."

It doesn't exist. Sure, we can claim it's the "reason for the season" and give all our affection to the one we "love" the most. But what happens when Valentine's Day is our only excuse? The rest of the year we ignore the needs and emotions of others, but as long as we buy those carnations on Valentine's day, our lack of love the rest of the year is pardoned with a standing ovation.

Don't get me wrong, handing out flowers every day of the year won't make every day a day for valentines, but we should keep that same mindset. Why only have one day to love people?

Besides, we don't know what love means anymore. People date, throwing "love" out in the open and two weeks later break up and feel like life ain't worth living. Uttering a word will not change emotions or expressions, it only proves we are ignorant to what it truly means. "strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties" and "unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another". Love doesn't have to be a romantic, swooning overdrive of the soul. But we use it like we use any other word: without thought and without understanding. Too often we use it, thinking we know what it means and how it feels, but we are almost always wrong. Love is not an emotion: it's a state of the heart. True love, not the fluff that we lace into so many conversations, is not shallow, stingy or simplistic. Love is no where near that tingling we get in our stomachs when our adored person of choice comes down the hall. Love is the soul deep affection and compassion for others that cannot be replaced, cannot be formulated no matter how influenced your brain is by it. Love lives for others, and not itself. Love is forgiving. Love is selfless. Love has been destroyed by society today.

I guess the other problem that irks me with this cursed materialistic spend-a-thon is the fact that that's ALL  IT IS. It has become such a money waster... no one even knows the true origins of the holiday. I would know: after all, I DID look it up on americancatholic.com (LOL). We try and reduce consumption and wasting resources through idiotic environmental summits and extreme measures. Why not cut down on the four month long production of overrated, uneeded holiday garbage? What ever happened to a simple rose or a word of grace and affection? If we as humans are unsatisfied with simplistic measures, which we are, we have huge problems. As quality of living goes up, our concern for others and need to spend money grows, like an overbearing monster of such greed that consumes the soul.

Now, I switch. Call me a hypocrite, but I'm not going to shun any gifts because I feel so strongly about this. I will show that love to others that I try and display every other day of the year beyond this one. I will accept the show of affection from my friends, for it has become a nature, and many of my school friends give gifts as their expression of love. But just as Sweetest's Day has become an excuse for spending money. Do you really think Hallmark wants you to show love to others? Not really. They want you to buy, buy,buy and help them grow, grow, grow, and we fall in the pit as if we'd been standing on quicksand. Marketing experts are geniuses. Look at how they have won!

So it has been said.